Some philosophers – eg. Fred Feldman, in "Feldman (Fred) - The Survival of Death" – disagree. Feldman claims that we survive death, but – rather disappointingly – as a corpse, which solves the “corpse problem”, but at the cost – most likely – of saying that we are bodies11 rather than organisms.

The problem if we don’t survive death as our corpses – it is said – is to answer the question where the corpse comes from, and to answer the objection that if it was there all along – as a “corpse-to-be” – then we have a situation where we have two things of different sorts in the same place at the same time.

If this is taken seriously, then it can be used against the form12 of the animalism’s “too many thinkers13” argument.

If there is a corpse to be resurrected, it is easier to see how identity is preserved than if we have total destruction. This is obviously so in the case of resuscitation, but even where we have a real case of death – not just clinical death, or brain death, but real death with a bit of mouldering – there is some physical thing that is responsible for preserving identity.

However, just how the analogy would work for the “corpse-to-be” needs to be spelled out.

The corpse has the persistence conditions of a mass of matter. What are the persistence conditions of the “corpse-to-be”? If they are those of an organism, then then the corpse-to-be cannot be the same individual as the corpse.